Jessica Kizorek used to start her day by reading e-mail and responding until she noticed she wasn’t getting to the priorities on her to-do list. “Half the day had gone by and e-mail had sucked the juice out of me.”

To break the habit, Kizorek, founder of BadassBusinessWoman.org, challenged herself to be more productive, cutting back to only four work hours a day. The rest she allocated to leisure. Instead of planning business meetings at Starbucks, she had phone conversations. “It’s amazing when you see what you can cut out, what doesn’t go directly into making you money. You only see that when you force yourself to work smarter, not longer,” she says.

How often are you asking yourself if you are spending your work day being productive or just being busy? Most likely, the answer is not often enough. In the United States, as a new Labor Department study shows, even as the average work week expands, worker productivity is on a slide. In the most recent quarter, the measure of employee output per hour fell at a 0.9 per cent annual rate, while hours worked climbed at a 3.6 per cent rate.

During our work days, we’re answering e-mails, we’re responding to text messages, we’re chatting with co-workers, we’re blogging and twittering. We’re spending more than 3 billion minutes on Facebook each day. We’re putting in longer hours but we’re not necessarily landing more business or moving closer to our goals.

“We’re focusing on the urgent at the expense of the important,” says Dan Markovitz, president of TimeBack Management. “People feel overwhelmed. Some is real, some is psychological. They never feel like they are caught up because they aren’t getting to the important stuff.”

The hyper-efficient worker

Most of us could learn a lot from the hyper-efficient entrepreneur or business executive. They make lists, they set goals, they delegate, they work in blocks of time. They don’t start their day in their Inbox.

When Carol Greenberg Brook, arrives at the office, she has already read her e-mails, flagged the priorities and sent them to her assistant to print out and create a to-do list. As co-founder and president of Continental Real Estate Companies, she walks in to her office focused on what needs to get done. That usually includes delegating and guiding staff on how to spend their time wisely. Experts say the biggest mistake most workers make is starting the day out reading e-mail. Instead, do the important to-dos in the first hour of work. “Ask yourself, if that’s the only thing I accomplish, will I be satisfied with my day?” says Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. He says what’s most important, typically, is the task you’re most uncomfortable doing — having a conversation with your boss or a challenging customer. “We need to reprogramme ourselves from ‘more is better’ to making better decisions about how we spend our time.”

Ricky Arriola, CEO of Intel Direct in Miami, is among the highly productive. He runs a 700- person company and chairs Miami’s Adrian Arsht Performing Arts Centre. He says being in good shape and exercising gives him energy to stay productive. Weekly, he writes down his goals and includes deadlines and an action plan. He knows what he must do himself, and what to delegate. “The goal is to not get caught up in things that consume my time, but don’t get me a whole lot of productivity. I want to focus on the big things.”Arriola carefully scrutinises who he gives face time. “When things come up and people want my attention, I have to measure what they want, with whether it will further my goal. If not, then I think before I get involved.” Arriola says this takes instilling discipline in his staff, teaching them to only request a meeting when it’s something only he uniquely can handle. “Otherwise I push back.”

Get most out of time

Experts believe the secret to being productive is to track how you spend your day. The next step is asking why you are spending time on each task and getting rid of what isn’t working.

After assessing how you spend your time, you should decide how you should be allocating it, what is essential to your success. Once it is clear, you will want to make those tasks visible — as a PostIt on your computer screen.

Clearly, the biggest challenge is avoiding distractions and staying focused. Ferriss says when people get overwhelmed, they often turn to reading e-mail as a default, instead of being proactive. He suggests sticking to set times to read e-mail.

Tips for being more productive

Identify priorities: Miami productivity expert Michelle Villalobos suggests you write down each day the one thing that would make a huge difference in your career. Do that task first.

Create deadlines: Villalobos says you are more likely to stay focused if you have a set amount of time to finish a task.

Manage interruptions: Figure out what or who is interrupting you. Is it instant messages? Is it your co-worker? Is it phone calls? Figure out how you can stop them. Consider using computer programmes that block use of certain sites during the work day.

Designate/set e-mail time: Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, says people often assume their boss wants immediate response. He found most executives appreciate when workers limit e-mail use to certain times of the day to be more productive.

Comments

Job search is no more just a process, a whole industry has been setup with branches coming around out of it. And while the industry has made the process relatively easy and streamlined, there are things that haunt every job seeker. Be aware!
Read more